Out-Grind the AI, or Win Back Your Focus?
The world is about to be buried under millions of flashy AI coding toys, and every single one of them is worth exactly zero.
Audiences don’t walk away because they are bored. They leave because they are confused. Identifying “what” something is will always be the priority. Figure out “how” to do it is just manual labor.
That irritation and dizziness you feel at 5 PM when you reach for your phone is, quite literally, a glutamate overdose produced by your own brain.
Willpower is a lie. It is a fairy tale invented by people who have never actually been addicted, just so they can sell it back to you.
Stop trying to out-grind the AI. Try winning back your focus instead.
Me: “Lao Bai, look at this dev. He used ‘Vibe Coding’ to build his own SaaS alternative from scratch.”
Lao Bai: “Tell him to try selling it.”
Me: “What?”
Lao Bai: “Suppose he actually builds a clone of Microsoft Office. Who’s going to use it? Where is the other side of the trade? Has he actually captured a market? It’s too easy to say ‘I’m going to Vibe Code a SaaS tool.’ The world will soon be crawling with millions of these flashy personal toys. They look great in a portfolio to fool outsiders, but their commercial value is zero. Business requires a buyer and a seller.”
Me: “At least it looks cool.”
Lao Bai: “Useless. Let me tell you a story about the editing industry. When editors first start out, they keep things simple because they don’t know any better. Then they learn all the tools, the plugins, the tricks. They hit the ‘brainless button-mashing’ phase where everything has to be complex, flashy, and over-packaged. It becomes a professional habit.”
Me: “Is that a bad thing?”
Lao Bai: “They spend all day obsessing over how to make the visuals ‘pop.’ They’ll spend an hour tweaking the easing curves on a five-second animation. But the people who actually know the game play with intentional simplicity.”
Me: “If it’s too simple, aren’t you afraid the audience will get bored and swipe away?”
Lao Bai: “People swipe away because of confusion, not boredom. There’s a veteran named Marco. His technical skills in After Effects are mediocre at best. He’ll take a dry, even slightly ugly static graphic and leave it on the screen for five, ten, fifteen seconds.”
Me: “In the short-video world, that sounds like a technical disaster.”
Lao Bai: “If that graphic has value, the audience needs time to digest it. If you add a bunch of frantic keyframes, you just distract them. The audience doesn’t need you to waste hours on visual presentation. They need to understand what they are looking at instantly. The ‘What’ is the lead. The ‘How’ is just the grunt work.”
Me: “So how do you find the ‘What’?”
Lao Bai: “You write. Writing is thinking. You need to be able to structure a powerful outline, tell a real story, and critically evaluate your material. Just slow down. Publish high-quality, verified content. Don’t just dump more AI trash into the world.”
Me: “Slowing down is easier said than done. Everyone is grinding. We’re not just competing with others, we’re racing against our past selves. You’re told your body at thirty has to be better than it was at twenty. Your progress bar always has to move faster.”
Lao Bai: “Then why not try winning back your focus first?”
Me: “I saw Alex Hormozi say that most people who claim to work hard have no idea how to actually work. If you cut out the distractions, most people only get about four hours of deep, immersive work a day. The average person picks up their phone 352 times a day. I tried a social media detox. I turned my screen to grayscale. You know what happened?”
Lao Bai: “It hurt?”
Me: “It was agonizing. Looking at a black-and-white screen actually made me feel nauseous and dizzy. I knew exactly what I was doing, but my hand would still reach for the phone instinctively. When I forced myself to stop, I felt this restless, itching sensation deep in my chest. I’m definitely addicted.”
Lao Bai: “No kidding. You have the exact same problem as an old drunk trying to quit the bottle.”
Me: “I’ve developed an alcohol dependency from scrolling on a phone?”
Lao Bai: “The underlying mechanism is identical. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant. When you drink, your brain spikes a chemical called GABA. That’s your brain’s brake pedal. It makes you chill out and shuts down the stress. But your brain wants to survive. It doesn’t want to be sedated all day. So, when you flood it with GABA, the brain fights back by pumping out glutamate.”
Me: “What’s glutamate?”
Lao Bai: “The gas pedal. It’s responsible for stress, excitement, and action. Imagine you’re driving. The handbrake is pulled tight. That handbrake is the alcohol, or the phone. To make the car move, your brain takes a heavy brick and pins the accelerator to the floor. When you spend all day scrolling at high intensity, your brain is flooring the gas just to keep you functional.”
Me: “How does that translate to the feeling?”
Lao Bai: “Think of it like this. On the first day you cut the internet, you release the handbrake instantly. But your brain doesn’t know that. That physiological brick is still pinned to the accelerator. Your engine is screaming in neutral, heading for a wall at a hundred miles an hour. That 5 PM restlessness, the dizziness, the feeling of skin-crawling anxiety? That is literally an overdose of your own glutamate.”
Me: “That’s exactly it. And everything feels so dull.”
Lao Bai: “That’s anhedonia. you’ve been nuking your brain with unnatural, high-dose chemical dopamine for too long. To survive the blast, your brain put on a pair of heavy sunglasses.”
Me: “Sunglasses?”
Lao Bai: “Exactly. It’s like staring at the sun. When you quit, the sun goes away, but the glasses stay on. Now you’re standing in a dark room, wearing shades, looking for a light. Your brain has literally lost the ability to perceive pleasure.”
Me: “No wonder people can’t quit hard drugs. It sounds hopeless.”
Lao Bai: “Right. They don’t go back because their bodies are shaking. They go back because they want to see the colors again.”
Me: “So, I just have to use willpower to grind through this phase?”
Lao Bai: “Willpower is a lie. It’s something people who have never been truly addicted sell to you. Willpower is a battery with a very limited charge. When you first quit, your brain is damaged. If you leave the door even slightly cracked—if you leave yourself ‘the option’—your damaged brain will eventually talk you into it.”
Me: “So what do I do?”
Lao Bai smiled. “You really want to fix it? Go to the mountains where there’s no signal. Stay there for a month. Practice some Tai Chi.”
Me: “I think I’ll just go back to scrolling.”
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